Thursday, May 27, 2010

So I went to a client-friend's house earlier this week, in part for the installation of a custom-designed, custom-built china cabinet (I'll post pics of it soon) and in part to take some pictures of her master bedroom, which I also designed.

Here's how the bedroom design process went: I started with the floor plan. The big challenge there was convincing my client's husband that it'd be OK to place the bed in front of two of the room's four windows. Once he agreed that was the best spot for it, completing the space plan was simple.

We'd already discussed using a yellow-and-gray color palette - stylish but not too trendy - so next up was finding just the right shade of gray for the walls: not too blue, not too brown. Once that was accomplished, I went on a long search for the perfect yellow-and-white graphic fabric for the windows. We tried out several, almost going for a Thomas Paul print by Duralee, which did look great in the room, but wasn't just exactly right. Finally, the right fabric happened to walk into my office, courtesy of a rep for Pindler & Pindler. In the meantime, I found fabrics for the bedding, and I'm not kidding, the design of the bed came to me in bed. I sat up late at night in bed, switched on my lamp and jotted off this super-quick sketch of the bed area:

It's by no means a great sketch - it looks like I jotted it off in three minutes at 1 in the morning - but it did the trick and we wound up sticking pretty close to it. My client's mother is a wonderful seamstress, and once we'd ordered all the fabrics, she did all the sewing. Then all that was left were the details. I found the quirky, black-lacquered mirror at a source through my shop, and my client already owned the nifty Japanese bird print that's hanging above the bed - I just helped her figure out how to place it along with the two small plates to achieve the right scale.

About Me

I'm a writer and residential interior designer, and I combine the two careers by writing about homes, design trends and lifestyle topics for newspapers and magazines. One of these days, I hope to add "published author" to the list of hats I wear.